I actually forgot about The Patriot. I guess I was so disappointed I blocked it out of my memory banks. That is when I swore off Mel Gibson for good. Come to think of it, I think everybody has sworn off Mel Gibson - I don't remember seeing him lately.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was my favorite movie AND my favorite song when I was a kid.

Say it ain't so, Searchers, a bad film. Never been a great fan of Wayne but Searchers is a good western. Longest Day didn't do it for me, maybe too disjointed. Pork Chop Hill was also an excellent movie on a difficult subject and time. Also, thought Quiet Man was interesting but not in the current discussion group. Does anyone know why the manhunt movie was scrapped for the hbo series.

LOL David, ya know, I had forgoten totally that he was even in it. There were just so many great actors in it that I managed to ignore him. I particularly enjoyed Red Buttons and so many others. So I amend my previous post - 99.50% of John Wayne war movies stink

The Longest Day. That was a special field trip with my high school. I think on a Saturday , we went down to Carthy Circle in Hollywood to see this important movie. The theater was a classic art deco theater with plush seats and beautiful decorations. The movie was amazing to all of us. Germans spoke German , French spoke French etc. I remember how amazed we were that eveyone was speaking their own languages and there were subtitles for them. It also was in black and white. That seemed to make it even more realisitic. I have recently read that there were actually no women in the moviel did I read that here? But that made it realistic too as women would not have been in combat then. Somewhere around here I think I even have the big fancy program we got at the theater. Remember when you saw a movie in a big movie house with intermission they had special edition programs? I still have West Side Story program too.

We went to Hollywood many times over the years with Scouts, Church, and different clubs in school to see big name movies. Cinnerama This is Cinnerama, How the West was Won , 10 Commandments, West Side Story , and the Longest Day to name a few.

there was a woman in the movie-- the sexy resistance fighter distracting and killing Nazis from her bike. there was also a bit part by a few nuns, who walked into the middle of the firefight between the Germans and the French, to set up a hospital.

Eric Marie Remarque of all Quiet on the Western Front fame (another movie for consideration in this thread) was an uncredited screenwriter for the Longest Day

And John Wayne had one of the best lines in the movie when he told his battalion:

Thanks David. I haven't seen the movie since I saw it when I was school. I knew the women's parts weren't that big at least. That line is a good line.

My high school drama teacher always said John Wayne didn't act , he reacted.

My father was in John Wayne's first movie The Big Trail back in 1928. He was 19 years old and working on a dam in the area of Jackson Hole. The movie company hired anyone who could ride a horse to work on the film. Daddy was an Indian, a bullwacker and helped lower the wagons down the mountain in one scene. He could not find himself anywhere in the movie when he watched it a few years before he passed away.

John Wayne was a legend in our house growing up. We never missed a movie. It was a family outing to the drive in when I was a kid. I think I saw every war movie he made and every western.

____________________That old man...had my division massacred at Gettysburg!"
- George Pickett said these words to John S. Mosby shortly after paying Lee a visit in Richmond
"Well, it made you famous"
- Mosby's reply to Pickett